Cyber threats: are you in denial?

From phishing emails to Ransomware as a Service (RaaS), cybercriminals mean business when they launch a cyber attack and you simply can’t afford to become complacent.

CYBER SECURITY AWARENESS – WHY DENY IT?

The ‘she’ll be right’ attitude really needs shifting – any business, big or small can be a target. Your best chance to ‘be right’, is to keep up to date with the latest threats and be onboard with awareness training – not only for you, but your people too.  Let’s dive into at Denial of Service.

DENIAL OF SERVICE (DOS)

Is a targeted and malicious cyber attack that can result in your online services being unavailable to your workforce, customers or potential customers. A DoS attack works by overloading your network with more traffic than it can cope with so your system crashes. This means your customers may not be able to do their intended transactions. It’s a big headache for everyone – disruption to the business and inconvenience to customers who may be accustomed to a certain level of experience. It can also impact your employees because they won’t be able to carry out tasks including sending and receiving emails or accessing other systems on the network. 

HOW AND WHY CYBERCRIMINALS DO THIS?

A cybercriminal will use a computer or server to send large amounts of traffic to your system such as your website. With a surge of hoax requests to be processed, your server will become exhausted and slow down before failing. This will impact all legitimate users including employees and genuine customers.

Generally speaking, DoS attacks may not result in data beach but ransom could be the motive. It can often be resolved without paying a ransom, but it will cost the business time, money and resources to restore operations. The longer your systems are down, the greater the cost to you. From a customer perspective, the frustration of not being able to fulfil an order may be enough to drive them to a competitor.

ATTACK TYPES

There are several types of DoS attacks with subsets within each. Generally, they are designed to either cause a company’s infrastructure to consume all available memory/ storage or network resources resulting in lagging performance before possibly timing out or flooding the server capacity with excess traffic. 

SIGNS OF DOS

• A slow down in the network performance making it difficult to complete routine tasks such as downloading or uploading files, streaming content.
• Inability to access websites, web-based accounts, data or send and receive emails.
• Failure to connect devices to the network.

DISTRIBUTED DENIAL OF SERVICE (DDOS)

In principle, this is the same as DoS but on a much bigger scale and that’s because the hoax traffic coming into your network is distributed from multiple sources. It often originates from a botnet, which is a criminally controlled network of compromised machines from all corners of the world.

As DDos is a more complex attack, there is the potential for larger businesses to be at greater risk. It’s likely to entail various devices across geographic regions, making it much more difficult to identify and correct. With more people in an organisation connecting devices to the Internet of Thing (IoT), DDoS attacks are becoming prominent so setting strong passwords are essential. 

CYBER SAFETY: DON’T DENY YOUR BUSINESS

Although you may require an IT specialist to help setup your network to protect your business from this type of attack, you can step up your cyber awareness and mitigate the risks.

Here are simple ways to protect your business from DoS:

• Provide training to your employees so they can recognise the signs of any cyber attack.
• Encourage the use of strong, unique passwords including any personal devices that are connected to the network.
• Apply IT security patches on a regular basis.
• Have an incident response plan.